It’s Christmas time. The season to be jolly. Goodwill and good cheer to all people. When we remember those who are less fortunate than us. And no one does this better than Keir Starmer.
Few can have missed the fact that Kemi Badenoch hasn’t exactly got off to the best of starts as leader of the Conservative party. Within weeks, her popularity ratings have slipped well into the minus.
For much of the time she has gone unnoticed – neither her own party nor the country are much interested in what she has to say – only stepping into the limelight on Wednesday lunchtimes for prime minister’s questions.
And there she has crashed and burned each week. Failing to make any noticeable impact. More angry culture war fighter than a serious leader of the opposition. Maybe it would have been the same whoever had become Tory leader.
For a long while now the Conservatives have been a prokaryotic construction: an outer membrane of life with no nucleus at its core. Increasingly sidelined from mainstream debate. Continuing to exist more from habit than a sense of purpose. But KemiKaze’s angry, brittle exterior has done her few favours.
None of which has gone unnoticed by Starmer. Bizarrely, PMQs have become one of his few moments of relaxation in his weekly schedule. One of the few times he gets to enjoy the perks of the job.
But for the last PMQs before Christmas, he decided to redress the balance a little. To give a sucker an even break. To allow his opposite number a chance of at least a score draw. The best that Badenoch can hope for these days.
At least that’s one way of making sense of the last few days. Now, it’s a given that running a government is a great deal tougher than being in opposition. Especially if your first task is to try to clear up the mess created by the chaos of the previous 14 years. This is 2024, not 1997.
But even so, Labour does seem to make life more difficult for itself than necessary. Most recently with its decision on no compensation for Waspi women. Rather than rolling the pitch first, it tried to sneak out an announcement just before Christmas and hope no one would notice. Reader, they did.
And Labour has been playing catch-up ever since. Having to point out compensation wasn’t in its manifesto – though it had been in 2019 – and trying to gloss over the support Starmer and others had given to the campaign in recent years.
Unsurprisingly, KemiKaze brought up the Waspi women in her first question. Only to rather bodge it. Her argument went like this. The Tories had never been planning to hand over compensation and Labour had made the right decision.
But even though Labour had never committed to acting on the parliamentary ombudsman’s report, it had previously suggested it might. So Labour were out-and-out hypocrites. Somehow it didn’t quite land. The real charge is of a party playing bad politics.
Realising that Waspi women might not play out as well as she’d hoped, Badenoch went back to the winter fuel allowance – her get-out-of-jail question. Only this took a surreal turn when she berated Labour for trying to get more people signed up for pension credit.
“How much more is this going to cost?” she demanded. It was as if she considered it a triumph that her own government had made the application process for pension credit so complicated that 850,000 people had been denied the extra money they were owed. An odd admission and one that wasn’t well-received on the Tory benches.
Starmer just stuck to his standard playbook. There had been a £22bn black hole. Sooner or later this explanation will reach its sell-by date, but we’re not there yet. It’s a truth the Tories cannot escape.
He went on to say he had been forced to take the difficult decisions the Tories had avoided. He could have added Waspi compensation to that charge sheet but was happier to drop that particular topic. Too soon. Too painful.
Thereafter the exchanges petered out into a stalemate. A bit of to-ing and fro-ing over who was more committed to the triple lock and then KemiKaze going slightly batshit by accusing Starmer of deliberately trying to kill as many old people as he possibly could.
We ended with Starmer boasting about the economy growing. Er … it’s not. It’s shrinking and inflation is increasing. Still, no one was paying much attention by this time and Starmer was probably the happier with a draw. Against another opponent he might have been in trouble, but no one could say he hadn’t given Badenoch a chance.
That wasn’t quite the last we heard of Waspi women, though. Plaid Cymru’s Ben Lake, the independent Ian Byrne and Labour’s Diane Abbott all used their questions to criticise the government for not paying compensation. Quite where the money was meant to be found was never spelled out.
Starmer stuck to the line. In the greater scheme of government scandals – infected blood and the Post Office – this one barely registered. And, by the way, all the injustices were the result of Tory decisions. So paying out £10bn when 90% of women had received adequate financial advice was not a good use of government funds.
Much of the rest of the session was relatively good-natured. People wishing each other happy Christmas and looking to get home as soon as possible. This has been a frantic year and 2025 shows no signs of letting up. Good luck with that, as they say. Still, Starmer could be happy that no one mentioned the Chagos Islands. Largely, because that was covered in a subsequent urgent question.
You can tell that the Chagos Islands deal is about to go belly up because David Lammy scuttled out of the chamber and left his junior minister, Stephen Doughty, to face the flak.
I hope Lammy said sorry. Doughty did his best but was hardly convincing. This is a deal from which everyone who was initially in favour is now running. The Tories – obviously – the Americans, the Mauritians. The Chagossians were never keen. A U-turn can’t be far away.
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